Economic Development

• What to Know About China’s Export Dominance By Keith Bradsher, The New York Times, April 19, 2024
  
• Poor Nations Are Writing a New Handbook for Getting Rich By Patricia Cohen, The New York Times, April 2, 2024
  
• Is Guyana’s Oil a Blessing or a Curse? By Gaiutra Bahadur, The New York Times, March 30, 2024
  
• The Clash Of Two Gilded Ages By Yuen Yuen Ang, Noema, August 31, 2022
  
• Is South Korea Disappearing? By Ross Douthat, The New York Times, December 2, 2023
  
• The World’s Population May Peak in Your Lifetime. What Happens Next? By Dean Spears, The New York Times, September 18, 2023
  
• Biden and America’s Big Green Push By Paul Krugman, The New York Times, August 17, 2023
  
• The Return of Industrial Policy By DOUGLAS IRWIN, Finance and Development,  June 2023
  
• What to read to understand how countries escape the worst poverty The Economist, July 21, 2022
  
• How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth By Joel Mokyr, EH.net, July 2022 [Review of How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth by Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin]
  
• Do we need a better understanding of 'progress'? By Garrison Lovely, BBC, June 15, 2022
  
• Book Review: How the World Became Rich By Davis Kedrosky, Economic History Research, Substack, June 8, 2022 [Review of How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth by Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin.]
•  About 200 years ago, the world started getting rich. Why? By Dylan Matthews, Vox, June 1, 2022 [Interview with Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin on the occasion of the publication of their book How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth.]
  
• Here’s the Secret Ingredient in Economic Growth By Peter Coy, The New York Times, April 27, 2022
  
• The World Bank as a Cash-Transfer Algorithm By Arvind Subramanian and Justin Sandefur, Project Syndicate, October 20, 2021
  
• Will China become the centre of the world economy? | FT Financial Times YouTube Channel, June 21, 2021
  
• Jobs, Houses and Cows: China’s Costly Drive to Erase Extreme Poverty By Keith Bradsher, The New York Times, Dec. 31, 2020
  
• Poverty Is a Choice By Annie Lowrey, The Atlantic, July 29, 2020
  
• World’s Biggest New Oil Find Turns Guyana Upside Down By Christopher M. Matthews and Kejal Vyas, The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 28, 2020
• Guyana is definitely worth keeping an eye on.
  
  "An oil-sharing deal with Exxon Mobil Corp. is estimated to shower Guyana with nearly $170 billion in revenue in coming decades, a giant windfall for a country of 780,000 people with an annual budget of about $1.4 billion and the lowest per capita income in South America after Bolivia."
  
  That's nearly $218,000 for the average Guyanese man, woman, and child!
  
  Obviously a lot will depend on the actual -- as opposed to estimated -- revenues, how they are shared among the Guyanese, and how the revenues are invested. But even if the money is invested in a well diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds earning a 5 percent annual return (I am being very conservative), that should be $11,000 every year for every Guyanese man, woman, and child.
  
  Given that per capita income was about $4,000 in 2018, the $11,000 annual payoff should make the average Guyanese four times as rich as he/she is now, without having lifted a finger.
  
  The WSJ report discusses controversies about whether the Guyanese government negotiated their deal with Exxon-Mobil as well as they could have. But fears about being ripped off by the oild companies would strike anybody who has visited Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, etc., as probably overblown.
  
  The bigger danger is internal, as exemplified by the petro-kleptocracies in Angola and Equatorial Guinea.